The Devil's Favourite Obsession

"You gave it to me," Cixi replied, her eyes still fixed on the blade.

She did not want it. She did not want it anywhere near her skin. She hurled the knife across the room. It spun through the air, struck the wall with a sharp metallic crack, and clattered to the floor.

When Cassian moved toward her, Cixi threw her hand up.

"Do not come near me!" She almost screamed it. Her voice shook. Her chest heaved. Her body pressed deeper into the sofa as though the cushions could swallow her whole.

Cassian stopped at once. His eyes sharpened, scanning her face the way a surgeon scans an open wound, clinical and urgent.

He took in her disoriented expression, the disbelief etched into her features, the way she looked at him as though she could not decide whether he was real or a continuation of the thing she had just escaped.

"Did you have a nightmare?" he asked quietly.

"I am not sure anymore." Cixi’s voice came out thin and frayed. "What I saw and what I am seeing. What is true, and what was a dream? Or are you tricking me..." She trailed off. The unease sat inside her chest like a stone she could not cough up, and her thoughts tangled like weeds in a forgotten garden. Reality bent and twisted as though she were walking through a funhouse mirror where nothing appeared quite as it should, and every reflection showed doubt and fear.

Cassian looked at her. Then he looked around the room. Then he made a decision.

Instead of going to Cixi, he walked toward the knife.

He bent forward. His fingers reached for the blade, and the moment his skin made contact, a sharp electric spark crackled from the metal. A flash of blue-white light jumped between the knife and his hand, bright enough to leave a brief afterimage in the dim room.

It did not stop him.

Cassian picked up the knife. He gave it one glance. One long, measured glance, the kind that contained an entire assessment compressed into a single second. Then he closed his fist around the blade.

His knuckles whitened. His forearm tensed.

When he opened his fist, the metal had already turned to ash. Fine and grey and weightless. The ash sat in his palm for half a breath before it dissolved into thin air, as though the knife had never existed at all.

Cixi watched, stunned.

"How did you do that?"

Cassian turned to face her. His expression was calm, unbothered, carrying the faintest trace of amusement at the edges.

"Magic," he replied. "You should bring your hands together and applaud the performance. I am showing you for free instead of charging one million dollars."

The corner of Cixi’s lips curled upward in a serene smile. The tension in her chest loosened. The fog in her mind thinned. Because the man standing in front of her had just made a joke so irritatingly, characteristically Cassian that no impersonator, no dream figure, no looping phantom could have replicated it.

"Cassian, it is you!" she exclaimed, and stood fast.

It was too fast a movement that she forgot the existence of her heavy belly. A sharp wince crossed her face, and her hand flew to her lower back. Her knees wobbled.

Before she could stumble, Cassian was beside her. She had not seen him cross the room. One moment, he was standing by the wall. Next, his hand rested against her belly, warm and steady.

The belly disappeared.

It simply vanished beneath his touch, the swollen curve flattening to nothing, the weight lifting from her spine and her hips as though someone had unstrapped a bag of stones she had been carrying for months.

Cixi watched in awe. She looked down at her own body, flat and light and suddenly hers again, and then back up at Cassian.

"Why did you doubt it was me?" he asked.

"There was someone who looked like you." Cixi’s brow furrowed as she struggled to assemble the pieces. "And it kept coming and moving... I felt there were loopholes with little variations of my dream. I do not know." She shook her head slowly. "I have never had such dreams. I saw you, but it was not you."

She looked at the floor, unable to explain what she felt or how she felt it. The dream clung to the edges of her mind like smoke refusing to leave a room, and every time she reached for a clear thought, the details slipped sideways.

Cassian’s fingers caught her chin and tilted her face upward. His dark eyes held hers, steady and absolute, anchoring her to the present the way a hand on a railing anchors a person standing on a ledge.

"I am here now."

"Yes, you are!" Cixi wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his chest.

Cassian went still.

The embrace caught him off guard. His arms hovered at his sides for a fraction of a second, suspended in the brief uncertainty of a man who had not been hugged with this kind of desperate, trusting need before. Then his hands settled on her back, one between her shoulder blades and the other at the base of her spine, and he held her.

He did not mind. If Cixi wanted comfort from him after nightmares, he would stand here for as long as it took.

While she pressed against him, her heartbeat gradually steadying against his ribs, Rafael’s voice echoed in his skull uninvited.

You have fallen in love with that little human.

Cassian scoffed internally. A soundless, dismissive rejection that moved through his mind the way a hand swats a fly.

He could not love anyone. He was not built for it. Whatever lived between Cixi and him was not love. It was ownership. She belonged to him. She always had. And the mark on her neck sealed their bond beyond question or debate.

It was not love.

It was a claim.

That was what Cassian told himself, standing in the afternoon light with his arms wrapped around a woman whose heartbeat had finally slowed against his chest, whose fingers gripped the fabric of his shirt as though letting go would send her back into the dream, whose breath warmed the hollow of his throat with every exhale.

A claim. Nothing more.

And if his arms tightened around her by a fraction, pulling her closer, holding her firmer, that was simply the claim doing what claims do.

Nothing more.

*

The iron gates of Whitmore University rose thirty feet into the sky, flanked by stone pillars carved with ivy motifs that had darkened with decades of rain and neglect. Beyond the gates, a long avenue lined with oak trees stretched toward a cluster of limestone buildings whose windows caught the afternoon sun and threw it back in sharp, blinding flashes.

Tatiana stepped out of the car and tilted her head back.

"This is a college?" she murmured. Her eyes swept across the manicured lawns, the marble fountain at the centre of the courtyard, the students drifting between buildings in clothes that cost more than her monthly rent. Everything about the place whispered old money and quiet power, the kind of institution that did not advertise because it did not need to.

Rafael shut the car door behind him and adjusted the cuff of his sleeve. He sauntered through the gates as though he owned the campus, his gaze scanning the courtyard, cataloguing every face and every exit out of habit.

"This place reeks of money," Tatiana remarked, falling into step beside him.

"Most places do," Rafael replied without looking at her.

Neither of them knew that this was the same campus Cixi McLore had once walked through with her head down and her shoulders drawn inward. Neither of them knew she had sat alone on a bench near the east wing, eating lunch from a plastic bag while the rest of the student body pretended she did not exist. Neither of them knew she had left in humiliation so complete that she had erased every trace of herself from the enrollment records before she disappeared.

They walked through the gates as strangers to its history. And the campus, indifferent as institutions always are, offered no clue.

The deepfake video that had torn Cixi’s life apart within these walls, the pornographic footage stitched together with her face by hands she had never identified, remained buried in silence.

The campus had forgotten her. But not her deepfake video.

*

Across the city, in a flat above a pawnshop that smelled of stale cigarettes and rust, Nelson leaned over a table cluttered with papers and tapped his gold tooth with his thumbnail.

His brother sat opposite him, thick arms folded, watching Nelson the way a dog watches a hand that has hit it before.

"She is with Crown now," David stated. "Untouchable."

"Nobody is untouchable," Nelson countered, his tongue sliding across his gold tooth. "She doesn’t mean anything to the Crown family. She is no one! She is an orphan, and no one cares for her as I do... The moment she stops being useful, he drops her."

"And if they do not drop her?"

Nelson’s calculating gaze lifted from the papers. A conniving glint flickered in his eyes, too sharp to be casual. "Then we give them a reason to."

"It’s not as easy as you think, Nelson. I need to understand why the Crown is allowing her to remain in the Palace. A woman without any known background living there... It’s intriguing. Perhaps I can leverage this situation to bring down the Crown family, along with Cixi. Maybe she is the key—a pawn who can help me manoeuvre Crown into my grasp. If I play my cards right, I might just turn this unexpected alliance into my advantage, using her to destabilise the very foundation of their power..." Said David.

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